Thursday, October 20, 2011

It's hard to be sane.

Everywhere I look I seem to come across some new memorial issue of Steve Jobs. Recurring themes: The perfectionism, the attention to detail. Design more important than function. No point asking consumers what they want, if you're going to do something really revolutionary they won't know what they want until they see it.

It seems safe to assume that the authors of these pieces did not spend the years 2000-2007 grappling with the new CJK GUI of OS X. (Ah me ah me, what evil looks Had I from old and young, Instead of the cross the Albatross About my neck was hung . . .)

It seems equally, sadly, safe to assume that the authors are not members of that elite band, the readership of paperpools.

If Time magazine can dust off old pieces on Steve Jobs, we at paperpools can do no less. We link now to an early post, our tribute to the man who believed in us when we did not believe in ourselves. The man who believed that American Mac owners, attempting to input Chinese/Japanese/Korean on a nice new Mac, might once, thoughtlessly, have preferred Help in their mother tongue, but would recognize the value of something more revolutionary when they saw it (the chance to work on their Chinese/Japanese/Korean while deciphering Help written in the language in question).

Monday, October 10, 2011

Note - I seem to have mentioned this to various people and given the wrong time (7 pm), having found this on the Calendar of le Poisson Rouge. It is in fact at 6:30 as a band will playing at 8, but if you turn up at 7 you will probably catch my reading anyway as I will be second.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Readers of pp will have noticed that not much is going on around here these days. I have been trying to compose answers to various interviews, so whenever I have access to the Internet and might otherwise fritter away time on a post I remember guiltily that I have not yet answered all the questions I have been sent . . .

The good news is that Joey Comeau of A Softer World may be coming to New York -- he says he will take the bus down from Toronto if he can find a sofa to sleep on. (I was in the Barnes & Noble at 14th Street the other day and saw all three of Joey's books in stock, so maybe we should go down and do an impromptu event.) If no sofa is forthcoming I may take a bus up to Toronto instead; this would cheer me up.

Meanwhile Elif Batuman has posted a couple of videos of the Lightning Rods reading at the Center for Fiction back in mid-September; one is of the reading, the other of a Q&A with me afterward. It goes without saying that I think I look and sound extremely peculiar, and need to work on cutting down on nervous fillers (I seem to say 'you know' and 'um' an awful lot), but at any rate it's all here for those who missed it.

Secondhand Sales

The Last Samurai was published in 2000 by Talk Miramax Books. First Talk went under, then Harvey Weinstein split from Disney and Miramax Books handed its books over to Hyperion, then Hyperion dwindled and handed the books back to Miramax who were not, in fact, interested in publishing books.

For a decade of the Miramax Wars readers faced a dilemma. They sometimes want to buy copies of The Last Samurai for friends. It was tempting to buy the book "As New" for $1.70 + $3.99 postage rather than for $14.95 with free shipping in an order of $20 or more, especially if there were many, many friends. The author got nothing on a secondhand sale -- but then, the author would get only $1.12 on the new book. To send the author $1.12 the reader would have to pay an extra $9.24. That's a pretty expensive goodwill gesture.

Goodwill doesn't have to cost that much. PayPal takes 30 cents + 3% on each transaction; if you send the author $1.50 by PayPal she will get $1.15. Many readers sportingly sent a donation - some were insanely generous, all went far beyond the call of duty.

Miramax has now given up on the hassle of dealing with distributors and such. It has reverted the rights to the author. So even if you want a new copy you can't get one until a new publisher takes the book on - it's secondhand or nothing. More than ever, we're grateful for the kindness of strangers.

i+e

John Chris Jones' The Internet and Everyone can be bought for £10: write to jcj AT publicwriting.netJCJ's website has a selection of reviews of this pioneering book.

Berlin

Linguistics

Greek, Latin

RhapsodesSociety for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin: has recordings of Homer, Pindar, many others.

PerseusExtensive body of Greek and Latin texts in the original languages and in translation; offers ability to click on a word for a definition, grammatical information. Also has lexica, grammars, various other resources. NB: the texts are generally editions that are out of copyright rather than modern versions, so the reader is for the most part offered texts reflecting the state of scholarship at the end of the 19th century. The texts also have no apparatus criticus. So it is a useful resource, but one to be used with caution.